I've seen a lot of gadgets in my day, even some of the coolest technologies ever made. Suffice to say, it's great when I pick up something that makes me think, "Wow." That happened to me today when I received the new memory card for my phone. I've got plenty of devices that take SD cards, and to me, there's nothing special about them. However, my new cell phone is the first device in my arsenal that takes Micro SD, a miniturized version of the SD card that's one of the most popular flash memory formats.
I've seen Micro SD cards online before, and I never really gave them a second glance. However, when I opened the package to my new storage card, I was taken back by how tiny these things really are. Yet what really knocks my socks off is that this little piece of plastic holds a whopping 2GB of data. Now that won't impress the youngsters of today that have grown up with USB devices and 300GB hard drives. However, I can clearly remember installing a (what seemed massive at the time) 2GB 3.5 inch desktop drive... and that wasn't even 10 years ago. That same amount of data now fits in something 100x smaller.
Let's compare:
Want a real crazy face-off? Think of the good ol' floppy disk, which was the portable mainstay much longer than it should have been. At 1.44MB per disk (and super slow read/write times), Micro SD holds 1500 times times the data (with faster speeds), and it's half the size of a quarter. Plus, it even came with an full size SD adapter, letting me use it with nearly any card reader out there. Bonus!
I'm sure in another 10 years we'll have 200GB of storage in a container even smaller... and I'll be just as wowed then as I am now. What tech gadget has wowed you lately? Post it in the comments.
